1. Technical Field
Embodiments described herein relate to a probe card and a manufacturing method of the probe card.
2. Related Art
Related-art manufacturing methods of semiconductor devices include a test step of testing electrical characteristics of semiconductor chips. Semiconductor testers used for such a test step are equipped with probe needles to be electrically connected to electrode pads formed on each of semiconductor chips on a wafer. For example, a semiconductor tester supplies electrical signals to circuits formed on each semiconductor chip via the probe needles and receives signals that are output from the circuits via the probe needles. The semiconductor tester tests operation of the circuits based on the received signals and judges whether the semiconductor chip is defective or not.
In recent years, the density of devices incorporated in a semiconductor chip and the number of signals processed therein have been increased and, accordingly, the number of electrode pads formed in a semiconductor chip (i.e., the number of pins) has been increased and the pitch of the electrode pads has been reduced. This makes it difficult to bring the probe needles into contact with the individual electrode pads with high accuracy. In view of this, various proposals have been made in which a plurality of connection terminals are formed on a substrate and connections are made to a plurality of electrode pads together using those connection terminals.
For example, a contact probe disclosed in JP-A-2001-52779 has contact projections that are integral with a probe body. The probe body and the contact projections are formed by resin molding using an anisotropic conductive resin.
Incidentally, the surface of a semiconductor chip is formed with a passivation film and electrode pads are exposed through openings of the passivation film. On the other hand, the contact projections disclosed in JP-A-2001-52779 are formed by resin molding so as to be shaped like a quadrangular pyramid or a hemisphere. Therefore, depending on the ratio (aspect ratio) between the size of the electrode pads that are exposed through the openings of the passivation film (i.e., the dimension of the openings) and the thickness of the passivation film, there may occur a case that the contact projections cannot come into contact with the electrode pads.